“I’ve been to the palace. It’s a neat place but really complicated. You need somebody to show you around.”
“I’m afraid we just couldn’t trust you,” he responded. “Sorry, but our laws and procedures require that we deal rather harshly with soldiers of an enemy nation who try and turn us into slaves instead of treating us as soldiers. I’m afraid you broke the Convention with me, my dear. I truly wish I had the means of punishment—of making you like Mia, or, better, having you trade places with Mia, whose feet you aren’t fit to lick. Unfortunately, I lack my magician, who’s away doing things and won’t be back until much too late.”
The crossbow, which had been lowered to her side, had none the less remained cocked. It began to come up now.
“No, Mia!” he shouted. “Just get clear of her! This one is Irving’s.”
The crossbow stopped, not quite fully up to shoot him. “Irving?” Quasa said, disbelieving. “You named a sword like that Irving?”
The sword arm moved rapidly in a single motion, the edge of the shining blade swishing across her.
For a moment she just stood there, a stupid half-grin on her face. Then, in astonishingly slow motion, Quasa sunk to her knees, and, only at that time, did her head fall off.
Joe stepped back as quickly as he could without running or disturbing the magical elements below, many of which were now rushing up to engulf the headless body and even the head itself.
“Coffee brown strings?” Marge said in a puzzled tone. “I don’t think I ever saw any that color before.”
The head went through a terrible series of transformations and gyrations including growing tiny hooves before it exploded like the previous body, but Quasa’s body, on the other hand, remained kneeling in the snow, frozen, as that massive coffee brown surge of strings rushed into it, easily forcing away strings of complex reds and violets.
The body twitched, then moved slightly. Joe continued backing away, and saw that Mia was safely back as well. They could do nothing now but watch.
The hands flexed, then went to the head and found only a bloody, spongy mass there, already cooling.
And then, to all of their complete astonishment, the headless body stood up.
“Don’t worry! At least we can outthink it!” Macore said optimistically.
“Don’t be so sure,” Joe responded. “We don’t know what shape or form it’s taken under those clothes.”
And then, slowly, something started to rise, almost ooze, out of the severed neck.
The head was somewhat bovine in appearance, but the eyes were huge, humanlike, and blazing with energy; when it opened its wide mouth, it showed, not a cow’s flat cud-chewing teeth, but a nearly sharklike view of pointed ones.
“I’ll lay ten-to-one odds to anybody that it doesn’t say ‘Moo’,” Macore said.
“I, Saruwok, live again!” it cried in a deep, booming voice that seemed to echo from within. The words were Husaquahrian, but spoken with a thick accent and many differences in inflection.
“A minotaur!” Marge breathed. “Or whatever inspired the minotaur. A bit smaller than the legends, though. It had less to work with, I suppose.”
“Particularly with its need to get a head,” Macore added, almost inviting an unprecedented aggressive strike by a Kauri for the remark.
Joe faced the creature, sword still drawn, confident that iron would do the trick with one like this. The traditional eight foot tall minotaur might have been a challenge, but at four feet or so, it was hard to take this one quite so seriously.
The minotaur spotted Marge. “You! Nymph! How long?”
”Damn it, I’m not a nymph!” she responded, really irritated. “I’m a Kauri!”
“Who the hell cares?” it roared. “How long?”
“A few thousand years, give or take. You’ve been out a long time.”
“A few… thousand…” The news seemed to shock Saruwok. Finally he asked, “How have my people fared since they were deprived of me?”
“Not well,” Marge told him. “You’re the first I’ve ever seen.”
The minotaur gave a hollow, booming sigh. “I feared as much. But now that I have regained life, I may liberate some of my fellow zlutas. We shall rise again!”
“Uh—you can raise them?” Joe asked, not really decided upon his course of action yet.
“With three bodies like your own, I think I can.”
“Yeah, you and who else?” Macore taunted.
“I am Saruwok, greatest warrior of my time!” he intoned. “I need no aid!”
Joe decided and approached the minotaur. “That may have been true a few thousand years ago, in your old husk,” he told the creature. “Unfortunately for you, I’m afraid you came up a little short.”
Dwarf steel came down with sudden swiftness, splitting the new head almost in two.
There was that crackling, electrical sound again, and this time it engulfed the body and was soon gone. The coat, pants, and boots stood there a moment, then collapsed into a heap.
“Score one for extinction,” Joe said, sheathing the blade.
CHAPTER 12
THE MALICE FROM THE PALACE
No quest shall be fulfilled until all the logical possibilities have been exhausted.
—The Books of Rules, XV, lll(c)
After a while they began to tell the warning signs of strain under the ice well in advance; they began to anticipate and avoid trouble, and became more confident of acting within the Devastation.
It continued to be a very dangerous place, of course, intolerant of all false moves, but it was no longer a place neither understood nor abnormally feared, if one respected its own unique Rules and powers.
No longer feeling the threat of pursuit, and with Macore leading a careful and meticulous examination of what was and was not possible within the eerie area, they actually grew confident enough to try a few things that made life much easier. The blocks of ice proved unnecessary in the end, although one still had to be very careful, and that alone improved both men’s speed and comfort. Still, by sunrise, exhaustion was setting in. First it was Marge, already ill-suited for this journey and always having to force herself to work by day, then Mia, who’d had a full previous day, much of it strenuous, and Macore, who had earlier gone into the Devastation with his tests. Joe understood perfectly; he was going by force of will alone, determined that he would at least be the last to be seen failing.
“We aren’t going to make it.” Macore sighed wearily. “We’re just too all in, and we’re—what? Halfway, maybe, or a little more?”
“We can’t exactly do much else but press on,” Joe pointed out. “If we’re on target, to our right and left this goes on for fifty to a hundred miles, and it’s at least twenty back and maybe that forward.”
“Then we’re going to have to figure out some way to get some rest in here,” the thief responded.
“What do you suggest? Spread blankets and nod off?” the mercenary asked. “Lie on a blanket and you’ll draw Technicolor after a while, no matter what. Lie down in the snow and you might not, but the cold will transfer in through these furs and freeze our sweat.”
Macore stopped, knelt down, and examined the snow. “Maybe not. It’s very dry, powdery stuff, and there’s absolutely no wind in here. I suggest we take turns. One of the girls and one of us. We might get frostbite or worse, but if one each of us is up, we can watch over the sleepers, both for signs of freezing or any magic buildups. A blanket roll can act as a pillow, keeping the head up and our breath heading upward. I think it’s possible. On the other hand, it’s got to be possible. Otherwise we’re gonna drop one by one and get the full treatment anyway.”
“I can keep myself awake,” Joe told him, although he wasn’t all that sure he really could. “You take it first, Macore.”
“I will stay up with you, Master. I, too, can remain awake,” Mia insisted.
He shook his head. “No, Mia. I want one of the two of us at least to be in some kind of shape, and Marge is going to be a
lot easier forcing herself to stay up now than in midday. Most of all, I trust you totally to keep me out of trouble while I’m out, so I might actually be able to rest; I’m not sure I’d trust Macore.”
It was a tough watch, although not particularly a boring one, as Mia would turn or shift, threatening to breathe down on the ice, only to have to be turned back, and Macore proved a fitful sleeper. Time and again there would be magical agitation starting, causing either Joe or Marge to have to make adjustments. In between, the two guardians had nothing to do but talk.
“Well,” Marge sighed, “here we are again, in the middle of it. It seems as if we keep doing it, theme and variation, over and over again. Same old challenges, same old enemies.”
He nodded. “When we started off, it felt like old times, but it’s grown old quickly,” he told her. “I’m tired, Marge. Tired of being pushed around by forces over which I have no control, tired of being the only guy who can fight this or that villain, tired of playing the game. Sooner or later, my luck’s got to run out. The worst part is, I’m almost afraid that it won’t.”
“Huh?”
He gave a long, mournful sigh. “I keep thinking of what Sugasto said about Ruddygore—that the old man was maybe thee oldest living sorcerer, that he’d been playing the game so long that he was playing it on automatic, just to keep playing, with nothing but temporary objectives. Pushing pawns around the board like us, doing it again and again. Maybe Ruddygore loves the game for its own sake, but I don’t. I know evil is always around and all that, but we small few can’t be the only ones who can fight it. We can’t be. Most heroes and heroines in the stories and legends get no more than three shots and they’re gone, happily-ever-aftering or riding off into the sunset. We just seem to be going on and on and on.”
“I know what you mean,” she admitted to him. “I’ve been doing this to relieve the routine imposed on me, but it gets riskier and riskier each time, and I have more to lose. It would be nice just to have a break. A real long break to relax and smell the flowers and maybe see a little of this big world without having always to run for it or fake it. Even Macore—the old Macore would never have gotten so hung up on this stupid Gilligan’s Island thing. He may have gone nuts over it, but it wouldn’t have been his whole life or the focus of his dreams. I just wonder if we haven’t shot our wad. The Rules tend to follow the story and legend requirements pretty well here. Usually, after great adventures, the grand epics go, there comes a time, almost always at the end of the third book, when the supervillain is vanquished, taken out. Forget that happily-ever-after stuff, though; that’s fairy tales for kids, and even the Grimm tales really were grim until Walt Disney rewrote them.”
“What are you getting at?” he asked her, feeling a bit uneasy.
“I think we’re stuck, doing this over and over again, until we take the bastards out. And I mean out. Then it’ll be some new class of villains to be set against some new set of heroes. There’s really no end of it until we die or they do.”
“Could be,” he admitted. “But—how the hell are we gonna take out a world-class sorcerer like Sugasto? And the Baron just keeps slipping away more and more. We had him in our hands, under our complete control, and let him slip away.”
“That’s the point. It was supposed to happen then. If we’d taken the Baron completely out, then and there, no matter what plots Ruddygore came up with, it would have been over for us. Sugasto is Ruddygore’s problem. He picked the S.O.B. to be an adept and then exiled him in the Lamp, rather than kill him in a wizard’s duel; then, when he needed the Lamp, Sugasto was loosed again. The Baron’s ours.”
“You ever think maybe he let the Baron go? That is, made it possible?”
“Huh? Why?”
“To keep us in. To keep from having to go against Sugasto with a green crew. And, most important, because I am the only one the Rules will allow to meet this threat. I’m not going to make that mistake again, though. If I ever have another crack at the Baron, it’s him or me.”
“You’ll get that crack. You’ll both keep getting at each other until one of you goes. That’s the system. The trouble is, even if we get him, it’s not necessarily happy-ending time.”
“What do you mean?”
“From King Arthur to Bilbo Baggins, when the ultimate evil in a world is vanquished, it’s after the good guys have given all they can. Even the ones that pull through have had it. They always seem to wind up sleeping beneath a hill, like Barbarossa, or sailing off into the mists toward some Old Heroes Retirement Haven, whether they’re human or fairy. They Ve done their bit, they’re tired and worn, and they just want out. Isn’t that what you were saying?”
He nodded. “Sort of. I don’t necessarily want out of life, though—I’ve got a son, after all, and somebody I love. I just want out of the game.”
She nodded. “I just wish I could shake the feeling I’ve had since Ruddygore’s place that the buy-out is pretty damned heavy.”
“You’re Little Miss Gloom and Doom this morning, aren’t you? Now I’m really not looking forward to this!”
The system did work, and when the sun was nearly overhead, they awoke the sleepers, detailed their own problems in watching over them, then tried it themselves. By dusk, all of them had at least some decent sleep and without real incident, although Mia had to admit quietly to Joe that it was well that she was a slave devoted to her master; otherwise, she would have killed Macore long before he got to recounting Episode Forty-One.
Although all of them still felt tired and physically wrecked, they made the other side shortly before dawn the next morning, to find that they were less than three miles south of the palace complex. Shrouded in clouds and mist, it was an imposing place, less a palace than a true island with a massive building at its center. It rose, black and forbidding, out of the ice, a massive volcanic cinder cone, with hissing fumaroles and geysers occasionally shooting from its flanks. It wasn’t all that much above the ice pack—perhaps twenty or thirty feet—but it was a clear oasis.
“Odd. I always thought of volcanoes as two miles high and snow-capped,” Marge remarked. “Still, Hawaii is a bunch of volcanoes and much of it seems fairly low. That’s because you’re only seeing the top of the volcano; the other couple of miles are underwater. It might be that much of that is really under the ice.”
Macore nodded. “I keep wondering about its relation to the Devastation. It’s so close, yet its great heat stops at the ice. It’s as if all the heat that was removed from that great inland sea to freeze it was somehow stored up here.”
Joe pointed through the mists of dawn at towers rising from the fog-shrouded island. “Well, there’s the palace. Tons of magic in there. God! You try it with fairy sight and all you get is night time again!”
Mia looked around. “I am more curious as to why there are no guards, Master, or terrible traps.”
Macore shrugged it off. “Nobody,” he said, “is supposed to get this far. When you build a fortified wall and fill it with every defense imaginable, you don’t also stick alarms and forts all over the inside. We’ve bypassed their impregnable defensive rings, which, I’ve no doubt, are nearly that. But the Rules always provide a blind spot. Don’t get cocky, though! Joe’s right—that place is black as pitch on the magical level. It’ll have its own internal security staff and gimmicks. Trip one and it’ll bring the full powers of both sword and sorcery down on us with nowhere to escape.” He looked at the place. “I wonder where they’d put my video gear?”
“Gear second, Macore,” Joe told him. “The bodies first. If we don’t get the bodies, the rest, your gear, our necks, won’t matter. The odds are, too, that those bodies will be inhabited by somebody and those bodies will have the capabilities we had, so they’ll be excellent fighting machines and well-guarded to boot. Once we finish them, then we’ll try for your gear.”
“Uh-uh. You do your business, I do mine. Once you do in those bodies, all hell will literally break loose, and I’ll have no chance. Once we’
re inside, we’re no longer a company. You three go your way, I’ll go mine. If I can help, I will, but that’s as far as it goes.”
There was no reasoning with him on that, and Joe was frozen stiff. Taking advantage of the clouds of steam and fog and the cover that the time just before dawn still gave, they moved toward the massive black region.
The moment they stepped onto it, they knew they were in a different realm. Surrounded by ice, the island, perhaps a half mile around, felt as warm and tropical as back home in a Marquewood summer. For the first time, Joe and Macore both felt the effects of painful frostbite on their faces. They forced themselves to ignore it as much as possible, and Joe, at least, knew that healing would be rapid, thanks to his were curse. He still had a bloody area in his coat and under it where the crossbow bolt had struck, but already there was no sign of a puncture at the skin.
“We’re gonna have to stash these furs,” Macore noted. “I’m starting toward ‘well done’ already, and they slow me down. I’d say we pick a spot in these rocks and try to conceal them. We may need them again, if we have to take the backdoor out of here.”
Everyone was surprised to discover that, under it all, Macore wore his gun-metal gray thiefs outfit. It was patched and well worn, but it looked like the old Macore once more.
“I stole it back, too,” he explained. “I wouldn’t feel exactly me without it, and it’s a bit of a walk to the nearest tailor’s.”
“I wish I’d thought of that,” Joe admitted. “It looks like I’m going to make my play wearing just a sword and swordbelt. I don’t even think the boots are a good idea. For one thing, they’re getting very soggy now that they’re warm and, for another, they’ll make noise and give little traction up here. Still, I’m gonna be pretty damned embarrassed if I get into a fight.” He looked at Mia and grinned. “Now we are a pair, aren’t we?”
Clothing secured, they began moving up the slope, quietly, low to the ground. Marge signaled a halt, then flexed and un-flexed her wings. “Stay here a couple of minutes,” she whispered. “Let me check out what’s” around.”
Songs of the Dancing Gods dg-4 Page 29
